13/01/2021: V-Tubers who streamed their way into our hearts

We understand why a lot of people aren’t that big on the “YouTubers” part of YouTube: a lot of their personality seems a bit fake and their egos are a bit too big and they almost invariably get dragged into all manner of nonsense. However, V-Tubers are pure and innocent and nice and cute and wholesome. Usually. Anyway, we at BTC No Pico totally get behind V-Tubers and here are our favourites:

1) Kizuna Ai (A.I.Channel; 2.88M)

The first, and most obvious, entry on the list belongs to no other than the queen herself, Kizuna Ai! She’s widely considered the first V-Tuber to gain widespread popularity (back in what I consider the Golden Age of YouTube).

Although she speaks in Japanese, she’s got a great subtitles team so anybody can get in on the fun. She does pretty much everything, even dancing and singing and PE tests. Personally, I greatly enjoyed her Resident Evil 7 playthrough where she swore profusely at almost everything. (She’s much better than I am at the game, though).

You may recognise her from a great deal of memes that have gained “classic” status, such as the “slight discomfort” meme, among others. According to her backstory, she’s a genderless AI who gained self-awareness and consciousness. If that’s true, then I, for one, am ready to serve our new AI overlords.

2) Gura (Gaw Gura Ch. Hololive-EN; 1.92M)

Gawr Gura is a shark from Atlantis, and very proud of it! She’s usually quite smug about it but she’s also quite clumsy and bad at math (thinking that 9+10=11; or that “simp” actually means “shrimp”). She’s quite cute and funny and she’s actually quite good at the games she plays (your typical Westerner lineup including indie horror games like Phasmophobia, SOMA, among other conventional games like Mario Kart, etc.). She’s also famous for saying “a” in a very cute way. (Something like, “Ah!”)

3) Natsume Moe (Natsume Moe – Virtual YouTuber; 451K)

Natsume Moe isn’t that popular but she works hard! She plays a lot of really weird games and does a lot of non-gamer stuff like VR scenarios and even teaches photoshop.

4) Pekora (Pekora Ch. 兎田ぺこら; 1.15M)

Pekora is a third-generation V-tuber from hololive. She’s supposedly a member of royalty from Pekoland, of which not much is known, although one might reasonably infer that it’s inhabited by similar humanoids with bunny ears and an extremely mischievous disposition (apparent from her collab videos where she’s always playing pranks on the other V-Tubers). She mostly plays the standard assortment of V-Tuber games like Mario Kart 8, Yakuza and, previously, DDLC and other battle royal games. Her verbal tic is pretty cute but I can understand getting annoyed if you don’t like it from the start. You may know her from the video meme where she chants (pon peko something) and does a dance before slamming the camera with a giant carrot, whereupon the video fades to black and changes to an unexpected clip, such as the scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 where R**** gets shot or the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

AWe hope they bring you as much joy as they've brought us. - Felix Argyle